A ‘Sad Case’ Suspect, Scared Pale as Police Swarmed His House in N.S.A. Case

Deborah Vinson, Harold Martin’s wife, outside their home in Glen Burnie, Md. Mr. Martin was taken into custody in August.Credit
Nate Pesce for The New York Times

GLEN BURNIE, Md. — Until the day the F.B.I. showed up, Harold T. Martin III seemed to be a familiar type in the sprawling Maryland suburbs where the employees and contractors of America’s largest intelligence agency make their home.

Mr. Martin, 51, was brainy and not very talkative. He seemed to have split his time between his contract work for the National Security Agency and the Pentagon, and his doctoral studies in information systems at the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County branch, a few miles from his home here.

“I thought the third world war had started — they came rushing in here,” said a neighbor, Murray Bennett, 84. “I looked out the door, and the officer told me to get back in the damn house. They didn’t want anyone peeping around. They knocked down his fence and were running around the back.”

By the time Mr. Martin was taken outside by the agents, he was handcuffed, Mr. Bennett said. The agents kept Mr. Martin, who was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, outside his home for several minutes before taking him away.

Another neighbor, Dawn Dincher, 43, said she worried that Mr. Martin, a tall, stocky man, might have had a heart attack. “He was so pale in the face after it happened,” she said. “He obviously looked scared to death.”

The subsequent F.B.I. search lasted for hours. “I happened to get up to go to the bathroom around 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. They had a couple of vans and were putting stuff in there,” Mr. Bennett said. Agents had illuminated the yard with floodlights and set up tables to spread out and examine the items they were confiscating.

Mr. Martin, whom friends called Hal, has not been back since. He is being held in federal custody, charged with theft of government property and unauthorized removal or retention of classified information as investigators try to determine why he had top-secret documents in the house and in his blue Chevrolet sedan.

An intelligence official involved in the investigation called it “a sad case.” There is no public evidence so far that Mr. Martin passed classified information to anyone else, though without his cooperation, it could be difficult to determine whether he had shared anything.

The description in the criminal charges of the material seized by the F.B.I., including thousands of pages of papers and dozens of computers and other digital devices, suggested no attempt to hide it. The charges singled out six documents “obtained from sensitive intelligence” that could reveal “sensitive sources, methods and capabilities.”

Photo

An American flag hangs outside the couple’s home. Mr. Martin, 51, worked for the National Security Agency and the Pentagon.Credit
Nate Pesce for The New York Times

“Has he made attempts to hand over the information and chickened out, or is he a collector of information and never intended to do anything with it?” said a senior Obama administration official, who spoke of the investigation on condition of anonymity. “There are a ton of what-ifs at this point.”

An N.S.A. spokesman said the agency had no comment. Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm and N.S.A. contractor where Mr. Martin worked, said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that after an employee was arrested, the company fired him and fully cooperated with the investigation.

Mr. Martin’s wife, Deborah Vinson, spoke briefly to a reporter on Wednesday as she carried groceries into the brick house with blue siding and an American flag next to the door. She called Mr. Martin “a good man.”

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“I am standing by my husband, and I love him very much,” she said before returning inside.

Public records suggested a few legal and financial scrapes over the years. In 2000, the Maryland tax authorities filed an $8,997 lien against Mr. Martin. In 2003, in Loudoun County, Va., he was accused of using a computer for harassment, though the misdemeanor charge was later dismissed, court records showed. In 2006, he was arrested on a charge of driving under the influence. That charge was later dropped.

Mr. Martin had been married to a woman named Elizabeth Shaffer, who later moved to Australia. Ms. Vinson worked at a craft store and a local church, where she occasionally gave sermons, neighbors said.

A Navy veteran, Mr. Martin earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Wisconsin in 1989 and a master’s in information systems at George Mason University in 2004. He began working in 2007 on a Ph.D. in information systems at the University of Maryland’s Interactive Systems Research Center, studying the kind of conversation-stopping subjects favored by N.S.A. specialists: “exploration of new methods for remote analysis of heterogeneous and cloud-computing architectures,” according to the U.M.B.C. website.

After nearly a decade of study at U.M.B.C. — part time for many years and full time since 2013 — Mr. Martin appears to have completed a draft of his dissertation while working for Booz Allen Hamilton. In 2012, when computer scientists posted on the university website that Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, had posted a Twitter message from the Olympics in London, Mr. Martin added what a colleague called a “good catch”: reporting that Mr. Berners-Lee had used a particular type of “ancient” computer to post on Twitter.

Ms. Dincher, Mr. Martin’s neighbor, described a man who was busy and reserved but never unfriendly. “He’s either working or at school,” she said.

She said Mr. Martin and Ms. Vinson could be touchingly generous. They gave her son Mr. Martin’s gaming chair, designed for video game players, and a mattress for her dog to sleep on. The couple sat outside at Halloween to give children candy. In 2012, when Ms. Dincher and her husband went on their honeymoon, Mr. Martin and his wife volunteered to look after her rabbit, which was sick at the time.

Glen Bond, 50, who worked in construction and lived around the corner from Mr. Martin’s home, said the raid in August had been fodder for neighborhood talk for a couple days after, but with little actual information, it had been forgotten until reporters showed up on Wednesday.

“I just found out what they were here for today,” Mr. Bond said. “It’s weird now. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

Nicholas Fandos reported from Glen Burnie, Md., and Scott Shane from Baltimore. Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, Jo Becker from New York and David E. Sanger from Cambridge, Mass. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on October 6, 2016, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: A ‘Sad Case’ Suspect, Scared Pale as Police Swarmed His House. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe